Book Review: Heart of Darkness
Apr. 18th, 2013 12:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness this weekend, because that seemed like a better idea than working on my papers.
I didn’t particularly enjoy Heart of Darkness, but then, I don’t think the book is particularly meant to be enjoyed - it is a serious business indictment of colonialism, which, props to it for that, I guess, but mostly I don’t go to literature because I want to be frustrated. Harrowed, occasionally yes. Frustrated is not the same thing.
There’s a sense of intentional incompleteness about the book. Everything that Marlow encounters is broken, nothing works, nothing is explained. If anti-mystery were a genre, Heart of Darkness would be its patron saint: Marlow is forever stumbling on dead bodies and not even attempting to figure out how they got there.
Instead he just soldiers on, intent on getting up the river to find a fellow called Kurtz, who everyone speaks of in hushed tones as being this amazing civilizing force but who is, in fact, acting as petty dictator on his own scrap of turf. He has convinced the local natives to commit human sacrifices in his honor, and keeps heads on pikes around his home.
How did he get from “I shall civilize them!” to “Yay human sacrifice!”? We don’t know, and we won’t find out: Kurtz is not so much a character (most of the characters are not actually characters) but a symbol of European civilization (a “universal genius,” a number of characters call him). His descent into tyranny is not a result of some psychological quirk: it’s an inevitable outcome of colonialism.
It’s hard to argue with this message. But...I like my fiction to have characters. I am shallow like that.
I didn’t particularly enjoy Heart of Darkness, but then, I don’t think the book is particularly meant to be enjoyed - it is a serious business indictment of colonialism, which, props to it for that, I guess, but mostly I don’t go to literature because I want to be frustrated. Harrowed, occasionally yes. Frustrated is not the same thing.
There’s a sense of intentional incompleteness about the book. Everything that Marlow encounters is broken, nothing works, nothing is explained. If anti-mystery were a genre, Heart of Darkness would be its patron saint: Marlow is forever stumbling on dead bodies and not even attempting to figure out how they got there.
Instead he just soldiers on, intent on getting up the river to find a fellow called Kurtz, who everyone speaks of in hushed tones as being this amazing civilizing force but who is, in fact, acting as petty dictator on his own scrap of turf. He has convinced the local natives to commit human sacrifices in his honor, and keeps heads on pikes around his home.
How did he get from “I shall civilize them!” to “Yay human sacrifice!”? We don’t know, and we won’t find out: Kurtz is not so much a character (most of the characters are not actually characters) but a symbol of European civilization (a “universal genius,” a number of characters call him). His descent into tyranny is not a result of some psychological quirk: it’s an inevitable outcome of colonialism.
It’s hard to argue with this message. But...I like my fiction to have characters. I am shallow like that.
